Komar Industries pulverizing the world's toughest junk

Sunday

Oct 13, 2013 at 12:01 AMOct 13, 2013 at 11:02 AM

When Komar Industries needed a logo, a friend of the company's founder came up with a drawing of a Viking with a screw-shape club over his shoulder. The warrior turned out to be a fitting image for a company, now based in Groveport, that builds industrial waste-disposal systems capable of pulverizing the world's toughest junk.>

Dan Gearino, The Columbus Dispatch

When Komar Industries needed a logo, a friend of the company’s founder came up with a drawing of a Viking with a screw-shape club over his shoulder.

The warrior turned out to be a fitting image for a company, now based in Groveport, that builds industrial waste-disposal systems capable of pulverizing the world’s toughest junk. Prices for those systems range from $27,000 to more than $7 million.

It turns out that the logo was the artist’s attempt to capture the look of Komar’s founder, Larry Koenig, a self-taught inventor who once sported a fierce beard.

“Apparently, that’s what he thought I looked like,” Koenig said with a smile.

He started the company in 1977 in his hometown, Bettendorf, Iowa. He previously had a business that distributed industrial machines. One of his customers needed to find a more-efficient way to process waste. He came up with a way to do the job using an auger, which looks like a giant screw.

With that project, Koenig went from being a distributor to a manufacturer, and he started a new company to build it.

He named the company Komar, combining the first two letters of his last name and the first letters of the name of his son, Mark.

Mark Koenig was 9 when the company started and now serves as its president; his father is the CEO.

Komar moved to central Ohio in 1984, part of an attempt to be closer to its customers at the time. It has 50 employees, up from a low of 26 in the depths of the recent recession.

The company has three main product lines:

• The largest segment, with roughly 60 percent of sales, consists of machines that feed waste into disposal systems, typically called “feeders.” Within the segment, the largest products provide a continuous fuel source for systems that convert waste to energy. These machines stand up to three stories high and weigh more than 50 tons.

• Next, with about 25 percent of sales, is something that Komar calls an “Auger-pak,” which uses a screw-like device to break waste down and then press it into a more-compact form. This also could be described as an auger compactor.

• The remaining line, which represents about 15 percent of sales, is a line of industrial shredders. These are like super-size paper shredders but are designed to handle wood, steel and other dense forms of waste.

Among the customers is the GE Energy plant in Shawnee, Okla., which is part of General Electric. The plant makes pressure-control equipment for the oil and gas industry, products that are delivered in large wooden crates.

Within the factory, the used crates became a nuisance, taking up too much space, said Abner Monterroso, the plant’s maintenance manager.

“We couldn’t get enough trucks or Dumpsters here to haul them off,” he said.

He needed a trash compactor that could crush wooden crates, but he didn’t know if such a thing existed. He eventually found Komar and ordered an auger compactor.

“You could throw anything in here, and it will crush it,” he said.

When the process is done, the crates have been reduced to the equivalent of wood chips, which can be carried away in far fewer truckloads than intact crates.

While compactors and shredders are key parts of Komar’s business, most of the growth is in selling “feeder” systems.

The feeders have become an essential part of power plants that convert trash into energy through a process called plasma gasification. The plants are springing up in the United Kingdom and other countries where landfill space is at a premium.

Unlike old-fashioned trash incinerators, these plasma systems take the biomass from trash and convert it into a synthetic fuel. The fuel is then used to generate electricity. The process leaves behind much less pollution that an incinerator or a coal-fired power plant.

Using trash to make electricity is “definitely a growth industry,” said Brad Chadwell, a senior research engineer at Battelle, the Columbus-based research institution.

“By using waste, they get rid of a waste-disposal need, as well as a need for bringing in fuel” for a power plant, he said.

Komar’s feeders are part of a $400 million system being built in the Teesside region in the northeastern part of the United Kingdom. The project will generate electricity for local residents.

There are no such systems being built in the United States. Here, the price of electricity is lower than in Europe and parts of Asia, which makes waste-to-energy projects less competitive.

Mark Koenig expects the market to develop in the United States once policymakers begin to realize how inefficient it is to dump trash in landfills.

“We’re in love with our big holes in the ground,” he said.

Larry Koenig, 71, is an inventor at heart. He has more than 100 patents, almost all of which are for products he created to solve a specific customer’s problem.

He did all of this with a high-school education and only a few college credits.

“I’ve been making things since I was a kid,” he said. “It was a hobby, something fun to do.”

He goes to work every day and has no plans to retire.

Mark Koenig, who is a 50-50 owner of the company with his father, has worked at the family business since 1986 and has been president since 2007.

He got most of his training on the job and through watching his father. He also took some college classes.

He could have worked anywhere but decided to stay with Komar because he enjoyed the freedom of a small, entrepreneurial manufacturer.

“There’s not a lot of other people to answer to,” he said. “We decide what to do and we do it. There’s not a lot of bureaucracy.”

dgearino@dispatch.com

@dispatchenergy

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.